dhinds@elaine18.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) (06/26/91)
Every now and then, a system directory on our Iris gets corrupted by an entry for a non-existent file. I haven't seen any pattern to what gets corrupted when. At the moment, /mbox is non-existent, as is a file used by our incremental backup scripts to save 'bru' listings. These are very annoying - is there any way to get rid of them without stopping the system and doing an fsck? They can't be rm-ed or unlink-ed. This may sound impossible, but sometimes they seem to disappear of their own accord during the course of normal operations. At least, I've never figured out how to get rid of one, but I remember some that don't seem to exist any more. As drastic solutions, are there any ways in Unix to change the attributes of a file to make it a directory, or vice-versa? Or is there a way to just edit a raw directory file? As I understand things, all I should have to do is change the I-node field of the bogus directory entry to point to a real file, and then just delete the link. -David Hinds dhinds@cb-iris.stanford.edu